Study, Design and Optimization of a Light Guide on the Door Panel for Interior Lighting of a Car

The thesis work was supervised and carried out with TECNOCAD, an expert company in the automotive sector that designed the Nucleus Icona. Ambient light is constantly developing, and this favored the increasing of a new generation of safety and signaling lights, indicator lights, LEDs and soft lights in the interior of a car. Although in the 90s and 2000s the focus was on essentiality, with very basic cars, where mechanics clearly prevailed over electronics, nowadays, thanks to the great technological development, the situation has reversed. The interiors of a car look more and more like real rooms where the goal is also to make the driver feel as comfortable as possible. The purpose of this thesis is to design a light guide for the door of the Icona Nucleus, a self-driving car prototype. The project starts from a study of photometry and optics that underlie the functioning of these lighting components, validated by some mathematical tests and with the help of TracePro, an optics simulation software. The results obtained will be the starting point for the development of the light guide. After having designed it with the CAD and after the first simulations on TracePro, the luminous performance has been optimized by observing the results and moving the position of the LEDs or adding new ones to obtain lighting uniformity. This thesis keeps track of all the operational steps for the realization of a light guide. The results obtained, besides demonstrating the validity of the procedure, can be a starting point for future developments of this project or similar applications.